I once met Riesman when I was an undergraduate, and he was a
visiting professor. That memory has not unduly influenced my respect
for his book, which could hardly be written today, so sweeping and
courageous is it in its scope. For me, its major claim to respect
is the way in which it predicted what is effectively the post-modern
movement and current culture. Commentators judge it in terms of
how right he was about '50s America, and say he exaggerated the
"social character" of the day: but he saw what was coming,
thirty-plus years ahead. There are not many texts which have been
so vindicated.

What follows is a sedimented account of the main
argument of the book, with particular reference to education. It
is "sedimented" in that it is what I remember of it—what
it has laid down in my psyche. So it is selective and perhaps too
neat, but the way to check that is to read it for yourself!

RIESMAN D, with GLAZER N and DENNEY R (1950) The
Lonely Crowd: a study of the changing
American characterNew
Haven; Yale University Press (revised and abridged ed. Gitlin 1969)

Riesman starts from a demographic phenomenon—the "S-curve"
of population growth as societies or countries become developed:

At the bottom of the curve, population is low, because in spite
of a high birth-rate, there is a correspondigly high death-rate.
Apart from infant mortality, life expectancy may typically be less
than forty years. So population turnover is high.

The introduction of basic sanitation, limiting infectious diseases,
and increasing control over environmental conditions leading to
famine, sparks a period of rapid population growth as a country
starts to develop. The birth-rate remains high, with the same large
families which provided a defence against premature deaths, but
the death-rate drops, so the population expands. As people come
to expect children to survive to adulthood, family size slowly begins
to drop. This occurred in the UK at the end of the 19th century
and afterwards.

Eventually, the birth-rate drops to meet the death-rate, and
perhaps below: population stabilises and may begin to decline.
It appears at the time of writing that even China is on the cusp
of this development.

But these changes do not happen in isolation: they are responses
to changing economic circumstances:

The low population period is generally associated with a subsistence
economy, in which each family or community is largely providing
for itself, and external trade is limited. Population growth happens
when change kicks in—as in the case of the industrial revolution.
This marks the shift to a much more complex economy based on the
production and sale of physical goods. Accompanying this stage is
a process of accelerating change—not only economic and technological
but also necessarily social and cultural.

The final stage in this model is a post-industrial society in
which it is not the production of goods, but that of services such
as education, transport, communications and health-care, and even
leisure industries which come to dominate the economy. (There may
of course be a later stage, but no-one has yet reached it, and Riesman
was quite prescient in seeing this stage coming in the States
in the late forties.)

So what kind of culture—or "social character",
as Riesman put it—do you need in order to deal with these changing
demographic and economic conditions?

When the world stays the same, but people come and
go, the major task—he argues—is to maintain continuity. The wisdom
of the past is the greatest resource, and so a "tradition-directed"
culture develops. It holds together the transitory present community
by adherence to the wisdom of the ancestors, and there is no premium
on innovation.

When the world begins to change, however, culture
faces a challenge. How to respond? Riesman suggests that the solution
is what he calls "inner-directed" social character:
the eternal verities of the past are valued and instilled into members
of the community, in the confidence that as long as they hold to
these basic principles in the face of change, the community will
be preserved.

My image of this is that of a clockwork mouse. You
wind it up (charge it with energy, or in this case values), put
it down and it rushes off discharging that energy regardless of
other circumstances. It accounts, for example, for the blithe indifference
to local circumstances of British colonialists in the 19th century:
their public-school education had led them to believe that there
were certain ideal (i.e. British) values which were universally
valid, so they dutifully—happily, even—exported them.

In the third stage, we have a long-lived population,
surviving vast changes in economic, political, technological and
social circumstances. The list of changes which have been experienced
by a pensioner of today would fill several volumes, and change is
accelerating. What kind of culture (social character) can cope with
that? The past is no longer viable as a reference point: instead
we turn to each other, and take our cues from current discourse.
At its most basic, this "other-directed" character
is based on fashion and acceptability.

Riesman goes on to plead for a different kind of
social character—"autonomy"—which eschews fashion in favour
of making up one's own mind about things in a principled and Enlightenment
kind of way. This part of the book carries less conviction than
his earlier trenchant analysis.

So what kind of education follows from these stages? Armstrong
(2001) succinctly expresses the tradition-directed approach in
the context of Muslim education, but as she says, it is not restricted
to the Islamic world:

"...the conservatism that always characterized
agrarian society. When resources were limited, it was impossible
to encourage inventiveness and originality in the way that we
do today in the modern West, where we expect to know more than
our parents' generation and that our children will experience
still greater advance. [...] in all pre-modern societies,
including that of agrarian Europe, education was designed to
preserve what had already been achieved and to put a brake on
the ingenuity and curiosity of the individual, which could undermine
the stability of a community that had no means of integrating
or exploiting fresh insights. In the madrasahs, for example,
pupils learned old texts and commentaries by heart, and the
teaching consisted of a word-by-word explication of a standard
textbook. Public disputations between scholars took it for granted
that one of the debaters was right and the other wrong. There
was no idea, in the question-and-answer style of study, of allowing
the clash of two opposing positions to build a new synthesis.

Armstrong (2001) pp.
87-88

There was an expectation in such tradition-directed education
that the old learning was just as valid today as ever in the past.
The inner-directed model recognises change in the world, and consequently
moves to a more abstract set of values, but clings to ideas of objective
truth and eternal values: it is what we would readily recognise
as conservative education today. Thus the efforts of Dr Arnold at
Rugby School, or the present concerns about whether pupils should
be inducted into the canon of English literature (and what that
consists of), all represent aspects of inner-directed educational
philosophy. Central to it is the authority of the teacher, and as another paper explores, educational
technologies and even classroom layout are implicated in this debate.

On the other side of this argument is other-directed education,
fuelled by post-modernism and humanistic
educational theory. As a motivator, competition is replaced
by collaboration; the role of the teacher becomes facilitative rather
than authoritative; critical thinking becomes more important than
knowledge itself. Hence inner-directed "standards" may
be seen as sacrificed to "relevance" and "currency".
Is it dumbing down? How does formal education stand in relation
to all the other media which are playing an increasing role in forming
and informing the coming generations? As a commentator remarked,
the current world-view may be "post" modernist, but what
is it "pre"?

The Riesman model provides a sweeping and perhaps crude way of
locating not only the values of education but also those of politics
and even art, within a process in which different countries and
regions are at different stages, driven by linked economic and technological
imperatives—it is a tool for understanding the "clash of civilizations".
But, apart from his call for "autonomy" it does not provide
any answers.

ARMSTRONG, K (2001) Islam: a short history London; Phoenix

HARGREAVES A (1994) Changing Teachers, Changing Times London; Cassell

HUNTINGTON S P (1997) The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order New York; Simon and Schuster

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